Nick Malik said:
VSS is for small teams, like the Original Poster. In that case, it's
simplicity and ease of use are compelling. In repeated surveys of
developers who chose VSS over the competition, the overwheming majority of
them gave usability reasons.
I wonder how much they'd used it in anger (branching etc) before making
their decision, however. That's the trouble - you don't really know how
usable something like this is until you've used it over an entire
product lifecycle. VSS is certainly simple when you're doing things
exactly the way it wants you to, and when you're not trying to work
with the more complicated features. Unfortunately, in my experience any
non-trivial app is going to require the more complicated features
sooner or later.
I know that there are problems with VSS. One of my projects involves
a dev team on another continent, and for that team, we are not using
VSS... and sometimes the integration is a little rough around the
edges... but I still think VSS is a good tool for small teams, and
the new bits will make it better.
The key things I find annoying about it:
o The repository breaks. The key thing I look for in a source control
system is that it doesn't eat my source. VSS fails on this front. It
requires reasonable frequent analyze/repair cycles, and even they
don't always fix things.
o The integration is indeed rough around the edges - you never *really*
know where it's going to put a new project when you ask it to place
it under source control, IME. Amusingly, the 3rd party integration of
VSS with Eclipse is more usuable (again IME) than the MS integration
of VSS with VS.NET.
o It's incredibly slow over a VPN, due to the file sharing interface.
We only have four developers these days - hardly a huge team - but
sometimes we do work from home.
o The conceptual model isn't as clear as it could be, when it comes to
labels/sharing/branching. I suspect this is true for most source
control systems though - there are certainly real problems which are
hard to solve with simple concepts without either fudging things or
preventing some solutions to real-world scenarios.
I, too, am under NDA. Let's just say that I expect that you will really
like what you see.
Now that's good news
